Friday, 9 October 2009

Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We'd just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world's information (in our case, video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere. Today, I'm proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.

Looking back at those early days, we were committed to some basic principles that have since become fundamental tenets in the world of online video:

Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.

Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content.

Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn't our business; it's yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so.

Three years after the acquisition, our platform and our business continue to grow and evolve. We are still committed to the same principles that informed the site early on, but we know things have changed. As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we've started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we've brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business. We're working hard to keep up with the fast pace of technology to bring you everything you would expect from the world's largest video site: better quality; a full spectrum of choices and tools for users, partners and advertisers; and ways to make the YouTube experience your own anywhere, anytime.

23
comments:

I wonder how many of this billion is watched by teenagers who'd watch videos after videos for the sake of watching videos. Videos, videos, videos. Videos.

Is YouTube actually a productive tool that connects the world, like the non-profit Wikipedia, in which case we should all be happy about this news. Or is it only interested in maximising profit, in which case the shareholders celebrate?

Congrats. One rather large black spot though is the current problem with comments on videos disappearing. This has been going on for a few days now & is really destroying one of the things that makes YouTube the great site that it is. Without the interaction between the content creators & their viewers this site will be no more than a boring old TV station. Most viewers come to YouTube to get away from that one sided viewing.Please sort the comment problems out.

I love the new layouts! People can always switch back if they don't like em. Google's takeover has made things more productive and has given youtube a bigger audience and wide-spread over the world since the takeover, all in all, so long as i can watch others videos and get on with mine, i am happy

Humph. The past few months has seen YouTube take a downturn imo. Stop forcing more and more adverts on us. Partners have them, fine, it's their choice. But don't shove them on random videos or on the home page. Despite what you might think NOBODY cares about the 'tailored content' that adverts bring. They just piss people off.

i think more youtubers are gonna leave youtube beacause its being just a bad place. i hope someone makes youtube like the old good youtube. because this one just sucks. GOOGLE dont you have enough corparate greed. you had to own youtube REALLY?!?! and its not even a youtube account anymore its a google account..

The guy above who said that we can easily change back to the old profile is wrong; that is not the case.And reference the viewcounts: the YouTube practice of victimising some users by freezing their new uploads to around 300 views is despicable. I had two videos' counts arrested for almost six weeks. Now they have started moving up again by ones and twos, completely discounting the hundreds of other views they have had. I might also add that there has been no cheating and all viewcounts have been legitimate ones, not that anyone can explain adequately what constitutes a "legitimate view."YouTube ignores the wishes of its users, which made it big; ignores complaints and really has the worst customer service of any website, in fact NO customer service at all, with nowhere to even lodge a complaint or get assistance.If any site got paid for the best service to its users, YouTube would go bust.

wow...1 billion views...and you still made the shit fest 2.0 channel...and the shit fest my_supscription and the new shit fest comment system...Keep this up and you will be lucky to get a million views per day.

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